Dutch court orders end to ban on The Pirate Bay

The Hague Appeals Court has ordered the ban on The Pirate Bay by Dutch ISPs to be ended.

The Dutch court found that banning The Pirate Bay had not been an effective way to curb the infringement of copyright. “This blockade imposed a violation of the basic freedom of commercial activity of the providers with insufficient justification,” said the ruling from the court. “It is of great significance that the providers themselves were not violating copyrights.”

The anti-piracy group Brein now has to pay the ISPs legal costs, which are 400,000 euros ($547,000). Brein has mentioned that it is considering going to the Dutch Supreme Court and filing an appeal.

Brein’s director, Tim Kuik, obviously doesn’t agree with the ruling. “The purpose of blocking The Pirate Bay is obviously to reduce copyright infringement via The Pirate Bay,” Kuik said. “It is paradoxical that although the court finds that this goal is indeed achieved, it rejects the blockade because users are going to other sites.”

As far as setting a precedent of some worth, Nigel Miller, who works at the Fox Williams law firm as a tech expert, believes that the lifting of the ban probably won’t have that much effect on those elsewhere.

“Recently the EU advocate general decided that under EU law you cannot issue a site-blocking injunction which is expressed in general terms, but you can require ISPs to take specific measures to prevent users accessing a website with illegal content, even if those measures can be circumvented,” Miller said.

“Other courts in Europe will certainly have to take into account relevant EU directives,” he added. “This opinion of the advocate general and decisions of other EU courts such as this one in the Hague Appeals Court, but ultimately each national can make its own decision based on the facts of the individual case and as to the terms of any site-blocking injunction which it issues.”